Whether a writer is working on a seventh- grade book report or a tenth novel, chances are each labors in solitude. Lonely job, writing, and it seems to me that the poets among us are the loneliest of scriveners.

Necessarily so. They stand back, way back from us ordinary folk, seeking a cave into which they can withdraw to track down not only the truth of things, but that special position of words and rhythms to convey what they have learned in a foreign land.

Was it unbearable loneliness that precipitated the poet, Weldon Kees’ disappearance from the north side of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge on Tuesday, July 19, 1955?

According to the writer, Anthony Lane, in the July 1 issue of The New Yorker, in his piece, The Disappearing Poet, the highway patrol reported that a 1954 Plmouth Savoy, belonging to Weldon Kees, had been found with the keys in the ignition. When two of Kees’ friends began to search for him, they found in his apartment his cat, fittingly name “Lonesome,” and a pair of red socks in the sink. His watch, wallet, and sleeping bag were missing, along with his savings account book, with a balance of eight-hundred dollars, which has never been touched. No suicide note was found.

On the afternoon of July 18, Kees called Janet Richards, who was heading out the door to take her mother-in-law to the airport, but waited long enough for Kees to tell her: “Things are pretty bad. I may go to Mexico. To stay.”

And another woman, Pauline Kael, a writer and broadcaster in the Bay Area and beyond, he asked, “What keeps you going?” The two had been brought together by a mutual interest in films. How we would like to know how Kael answered Kees’ question, seeming to spring from a dark, desperate place.

Most people today have never heard of Kees. The Collective Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Danald Justice, was published in 1960. No doubt it was read by a handful of scholars, but this writer, painter, short story writer, novelist and film producer has pretty much disappeared beyond the literary horizon.

Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Nebraska of German ancestry. His father, John Kees, a man of limited interest in literature, managed the F.D. Kees Manufacturing Company, makers of hooks, handles, corn-huskers, and other hardware items.

The future writer’s mother was a no-nonsense, forbidding figure to her only child. Young Kees’ matured into a figure describd by Robert F. Knoll in Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation:

He may have looked like a ‘pinko’ to Gage County, Nebraska, but to the urban crowd of The New Masses, which he read, he was Old Guard.

Photographs reveal him as “reluctant to smile, armed with a cigarette as if with a dagger, and graced with a trim mustache: thus equipped, he came closer than any other American author, living or dead, to looking like Howard Hughes.”

Lane suggests that in Kees’ poem, Subtitle,” We feel ourselves to be in the presence of a Masonic plan: a politely coded scheme to shift around the furniture of our daily lives, and to see what the rearrangement brings by way of enchantment and threat.”

We request these things only:
All gum must be placed beneath the seats
Or swallowed quickly; all popcorn sacks
Must be left in the foyer.
The doors will remain closed throughout The performance.
Kindly consult Your programs: observe that
There are no exits.
That is
A necessary precaution.

The author says Kees would never go so far as to cry out, “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, but he might have been the sort to croon it in the ear of an usherette. He makes it his business to put us at our unease.

Question: In doing so, did Kees place himself in the state of unease? In the warning about “no exits” do we find a hint of conviction that there is no escape from the frustrations of a life of striving for success that was always just beyond his grasp? And might the seeds for such dissatisfaction be found in a lonely child’s seeking the warmth of approval and love from parents who could not provide such nourishment?

For encouragement, he looked in vain to his wife, Ann Swann, who became an alcoholic. After treatment at Angley Porter Clinic, she left against advice after three weeks. In a letter to Conrad Aiken, Kees wrote:

We are now separated and she has agreed to a divorce, and I hope she will be all right. We were married for sixteen years and a lot of it was not so good.

Kees moved into a small apartment, alone, at the age of forty, and told Michael Grieg, a longtime friend, “If I did not feel it was in bad taste, I would unburden myself. I am in despair. Let’s go off where I can tell you about it.” But he never did.

Lane cautions his readers: “There is no more volatile compound known to man than that of decorum and despair.”

No one can be sure Kees leaped into the water July 18, 1955. Toni Barrett, who, as a little girl, had known Kees, said she saw him again in New Orleans, with a blonde on his arm, in 1962. A BBC television documentary on Kees, broadcast in 1933, included an interview with the writer Pete Hamill, who drank with a stringer in Mexico and later claimed he was Weldon Kees.

Disappearing from one’s history is a form of suicide, a terrible despair. Whether or not Kees leaped from the bridge is unanswerable. However, we are left to ponder how we would answer the question from a fellow traveler: “What keeps you going?” Do we know what keeps us going?

A trust that prompts such questioning isn’t something one earns in a five-second pause in a conversation. It begins with friendship, genuine caring and love. Even with these gifts, suicide may not be prevented., in which case, beneath the burden of heartache, Christ is present, the Christ who loves our family and friends even more than we.

Lord, we pray that we may be instruments of your healing, finding the courage to leave our safe, comfortable places to serve those You love with your wisdom and hope. Amen. Amen.

Home

Archives